Of legends are us.a as a

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A mid life crisis.

Uh! What the ………?
I’m not having one – not yet. I feel assured of that within my own mind.
A 40 year wait could be made to look like one though, if it were interpreted that way.
If you were to align that time span with driving cars, or bikes, then that for me equates to 40 years of driving vehicles with different number licence plates attached to those vehicles, obviously.
Each licence plate fitted to each vehicle was individual to that vehicle at that time in as much as it’s attached plate was what it was originally licensed to be on the road with. Each licence plate carried along with it an individual meaning when aligned with that vehicle, as seen by myself at any rate. Then seemingly did both together highlight a spookily similar paring to that of the owner (myself) and his pathway through life.  

Driving cars – 
Back then, (40 years ago) there was many a time when I thought I would treat myself to a special something that in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t. When beginning driving as a new driver from the word go, this special something was the fitted item with an ability (if used imaginatively) to endorse a personal message.
I’m not sure how that special something sits with new pass drivers these days, or come to that what percentage of new pass drivers these days would give it a second thought.
For me, it was a second thought. And the more I thought about it the more of them I saw on the road.

One of my brother’s bought a car once. He bought it off of a bloke whose own car (the one which he wasn’t selling at the time) was registered as ‘18 RU’, on the licence plate.
I was with my brother when he went to view the car for sale and I remember the guy whose car it was for sale saying that, as a doctor he was always being asked for prescriptions from people who he had to be sure were over the age of eighteen. Consequently he opted to buy a number plate that read as: 18 RU.
Makes sense I suppose. It did for him at any rate.
I’m sure that licence plate hosted a hefty price tag back then. 

For myself, buying a licence plate back then would have been for reasons only I could justify as being worth it. To me alone it would have made sense in as much as the personal licence plate was the one thing I thought I wanted in order to highlight my individuality. Why I wanted to be noticeable on the road more than normal wasn’t something I had an answer to.
Ridiculously, it wouldn’t have highlighted my individuality at all seeing as it would have made only as much sense as all the other meaningless number plates that are seen everywhere these days; which mostly and simply read as say – a set of initials for instance. My take on a personal number plate 40 years ago wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much chances of reading anything sensible back then. 
It would have been the wrong item in as much as it would have been poorly chosen.
I know that now.
Because I never did treat myself to that item, it then was not so much poorly chosen, as not chosen at all.

Such items as individual licence plates are much cherished by the owner of that licence plate, whether they mean anything to anyone else or not. And usually not is the case.
How often are licence plates seen on vehicles, clearly chosen as personal licence plates to mean something to the owner of that vehicle; which when seen by anyone else mean nothing at all? 
There is a saying that goes – 99 out of a 100, or 99%.
As far as general sayings go that is probably not far from the truth.
I would say it was a fair estimate that in 99 percent of the plates seen on vehicles that are personal licence plates, they actually mean nothing at all to anyone else. Maybe even higher than that.

The funny thing about a set of initials on a licence number plate is that unless by fluke they say a word when put together, they won’t read as a sensible word.
Ok, that’s not always the case and its very probable that in loads of cases a three letter word can be construed from that which is available. And fair play to that. However, mostly the plates out there either are just the same jumble of letters it was to start with only with different letters and numbers.
Worse still though is when the owner constructs the plate to be either smaller than it legally should be, the letters and numbers to be smaller than they legally should be, a black, yellow or white bolt where there shouldn’t be a black, yellow or white bolt, or even worse again if the letters and numbers aren’t where they legally should be because they’ve all been spaced out to look like something they shouldn’t.
Huh. I mean, come on. That’s desperate. Do we really want to know?
I am left wondering on many occasions why vehicles have personal licence plates stuck to them with letters that are quite obviously a set of initials, but also seemingly contain a bunch of other letters and numbers that are bunched and spaced to read something. 
Or they just want it to be known that they managed to find a good descriptive word to spell out on a licence plate which they then went and bought.
Frankly, who cares.
But then it’s an open market. And if someone wants that on their car then that is their choice.
There’s a flip side I suppose in that: do some folk regret that licence plate that they bought and foolishly played around with the letters and numbers with in order to look like something that in retrospect looks just plain ridiculous? 
Just me being me, I think it reasonable to wonder that out of a hundred people, how many people would choose to have a personal licence plate if the one they really wanted was readily available? Probably 99 out of a 100 would be a fair guess.
But that’s the difficult thing about personal license plates. Because of the amount of letters and numbers available, and with most surnames for instance being longer than three letters, the chances of getting a license plate that spells out a surname are limited.

Going back 40 years there used to be a well known motoring newspaper. I used to buy it regularly to look through certain pages full of licence plate numbers for sale. Finding the right number plate to fit back then would have been expensive. Not that things have changed very much there. Plus it was a bit of an unknown back then. Loads of companies set themselves up selling licence plates. I regularly lost myself in searching, intent on buying the right plate when I found it.
I was wage earning and – weirdly, I didn’t care too much about money. I’m sure it showed: I spent a lot of money on a hobby at the time. An expensive hobby.
I was glad I spent money on that hobby. Retrospectively there was more value to be had from that than a particular relationship that was ongoing at the time. If I’d known then what I knew years later I wouldn’t have bothered putting effort into that relationship so much. Makes me glad I thought about spending cash on something that at the time seemed even a bit selfish I suppose.
Some hobbies consume money in a roller coaster type fashion. The more money you spend on it, the more you seem to have to spend on it.
But who cared, I didn’t.

Number plates –
As a past time when we were younger we raced off road bikes. Mum and dad relentlessly transported us to the next event without fail, come rain or shine.
As a result of competing in the various clubs that we were affiliated to, we all (each one of us) obviously had a race number allocated to each one of us that carried over to all the clubs. That number stayed with that rider. It never changed. 
The same race numbers began to be seen at many tracks and because of its individuality therefore migrated onto crash helmets and other places too.
Those numbers said it all. The race numbers were fixed for the duration of schoolboys scrambles until leaving at the age of seventeen. Years of riding with one race number meant that soon enough, individual riders built up a name for themselves. Regular visitors to club events would know who they were watching purely by the rider number. 

We were four brothers with four continuous numbers. We were an oddity for sure. We were unique actually. We were even lucky to be recognised in a national newspaper. It wasn’t the numbers for why we made an appearance in a national newspaper, it was because there were four of us.
When we were featured as a centre spread, dad and mum bought all the MCN newspapers for miles around. Unfortunately they all got ruined due to a flooded house in later years.
But we were still unique. Our race numbers didn’t change. And years later people still recognised the person from the race plate. 

My older brother still races to this day and still races with the same number that he was allocated in schoolboys. He races with 98.
My younger brother races sometimes. He uses his old number too. 
I would also request that I race with the same number from schoolboys if I resumed racing now.
It’s funny what a race number can do to your frame of mind. It’s like you become that number.
I did race with different numbers in adult racing, but only one number ever held the same prestige.
My older brother did too, but later opted to revert back to number 98. And that is how the number becomes a part of your life.

In schoolboys we raced with consecutive numbers in order of age. At the time I remember thinking that was a cool move by the organisers of the racing events. I felt lucky. Lucky to be allocated with that number which would be mine.
I am very proud of that.
Considering that my older brother was running the race number 98, and allowing for consecutive numbers to be allocated for a group of four brothers with number 98 going to the elder of the four, then it made perfect sense that the numbers from there went backwards towards the lower number, i.e. 98 for the elder, dropping one number at a time to 95 for the younger. I was in the equal middle.

Into the future –
Forty years later, out of nowhere I decide now is the right time to buy my licence plate. It was one of those weird moments. In fact, it was hard to contemplate why I should decide that right now is the correct time to find the right licence plate. It just happened that way.
In truth, I never stopped thinking about it for the last 40 years, on and off. Now though, there’s a another dimension at work here. I feel it is right.

Now we have the internet and everything is so easy. The DVLA got in on the act and made it easier still. 
These days I feel there may be more trust in this practice of buying and selling personalised number licence plates because the DVLA backs it up. That may go some way to explain why I never bought a plate years ago. I did even see my desired plate attached to a red car driving along on the bypass 30 or so years ago.
The car was red for a reason.
It was a Ferrari. The licence plate spelled out my name with a single number to follow. I realised then that I would never own my own name on my own licence plate. Certainly not in the combination that I saw it that day.
That was a blow. Someone else already had it. Not that it would ever have been a realistic proposition in the first place. It would have hosted a hefty price tag. And yes, I already knew that. The advertisements made it perfectly clear how much certain types of desired licence plates would cost.
It was all a pipe dream.
Except, my name was never what I was looking for to appear on a personal plate in the first place. It was only this sighting on a red car that put things into perspective.

With a little more thought, there would be plenty of other combination of letters and numbers available. Maybe even my name set out in a different way, who knows.
I guess I could never quite make up my mind to buy back along. Probably all along I knew the wrong combination of letters and numbers wouldn’t fit me personally.

Into the future and it feels like the time is right to buy my personal licence plate.
It’s all about the licence plate, not the car. I’m not the sort who is bothered about constantly renewing vehicles unless there is a real need. We have a neighbour who has had so many vehicles that licence plates would be utterly meaningless to him, even if a meaning could be found.
I choose carefully when looking for a replacement car. I do the homework and I do the reviews.
The internet makes sourcing a car relatively easy. If using the internet a licence plate is usually visible in at least one photograph so it would be fair to say that if viewing a car sourced on-line, the licence plate would be a known factor. On the other hand, it would be ridiculous to buy that car because of it. It’s the car that’s for sale after all.

Hidden message –
The licence plate on my current car doesn’t doesn’t spell out any interpreted and associated lifetime patterns at all. I did know the plate before I viewed the car. I didn’t buy the car because of it.
My previous car to the one that I now currently run was a branded name by the way of ‘Trendline’. It was a Volkswagen Passat. If a trendline were to be followed, that it certainly did, by following a long trend of licence plate meanings. That car turned out to be the most obvious choice to carry with it another most meaningful and fitting licence plate.
That very particular Volkswagen Passat ‘Trendline’ vehicle was an unknown to me in all ways. Despite tens of hours of on-line hunting I never did know the licence plate before I bought it. I never saw any pictures of the car before I bought it and there was all but no choice in the matter when I did buy it. 
My perception of viewing a vehicle known as a Passat was to intentionally view a vehicle which was known as a Passat. I’d never heard of the name Trendline before.
This car emphasised a very peculiar space in time which relates to number plates being relevant to a pathway through life for myself at the time. 
It was weird.

My current car carries a number plate I cannot match to anything, no matter how creative I try to imagine.
On previous cars and vehicles, the plate that was fitted to that vehicle spelled out to me the name I would allocate to that car, or its meaning associated with personal life pathways at the time. It was a given. I would see it and I would name it, or find meaning in it – simple.
The easiest of all of them was ‘Mad Dog Yellow’. The plate itself was MDY. No one else would have seen it that way. It was my plate and it was how it appeared after I saw it. Being the easiest was one thing though, being the standout was another. 
And so it wasn’t that MDY stood out as the most relevant. It was BV54 that was the stand out plate of all. This plate was on Trendline after all. BV54 KTJ was very meaningful, without doubt. A  hugely significant licence plate whose meaning was so real it was unreal.
My newest car however is an anomaly in the trend of attached licence number plates carrying a meaning. How can I read OBC?
Nope, I can’t get anything from it. I even tried to deliberately find something to fit. Nothing jumps out at me.

Preferred names.
So there seemed little chance of ever getting my name on a licence plate, well, not with a single number to follow at any rate. Maybe then my name could be formatted after the number.
Be careful though, (I warn myself.) A number has to mean something, otherwise it’s meaningless.
I couldn’t make myself buy a number plate with a number on it that didn’t stand for anything at all. Even if to no one else it didn’t look apparently like it had a meaning, to me it had to. The number had to actually mean something.

Once the search for a licence plate begins it can take you in all directions. Lots of combinations could be possible. It is important however to be sensible about it and not let the mind wonder from its original course before it all gets out of hand and then what started as an interesting trawl ends up with all sorts of (even absurd) possibilities.
With the searching in hand I would look. I would scour the pages and then leave it for months on end, look again and then leave for further months on end. Computer technology which wasn’t available forty years earlier makes for easy searching.
Now though I’m stuck on a course that isn’t properly defined. I’m trying to make something fit. I have no clear definition as to the appearance of how the plate should be. I don’t know the answers. It is clear that I should look now though.

In the end it’s 40 years gone by and there had never been a preference licence plate for sale out there. It’s weirder even still that right now, I was tempted with the need to look for that plate once again.
Weird for sure.
I thought I’d been over this a million times before. What wasn’t there before was still not going to be there now. Stands to reason.
But look I felt I must.
So I did.
I looked at it from a different angle this time. I looked at different numbers and different letters. 
Unless the name is short it’s really not going to work.
Companies are able to get a meaning from a chosen licence plate but it doesn’t work for me. It represents the nature of their business and makes it easier for them to sell plates. There’s even plates out there which suit businesses too. A fashion that is getting more popular. Or so it looked apparent to me. I’ve seen buses with BUS on the plate for instance. There’s been others as well. Too many to mention.

I’m on the computer scouring the market for my chosen plate. I don’t think I’ve much chance in making anything work. I must have already tried everything.
Over the years the words that could be put together from a DVLA data bank of millions became less and less. The sensible ones that were available went for big money – and that kind of defied the object of the exercise as time went by. The more I thought about it the more I was aware of a deepening sense of not understanding anymore what I was looking for. In part also because I was noticing a trend on the market where it wasn’t only the sensible ones that were available for the big money, but more and more it was completely un-sensible ones whose prices were hiked up so much.

I didn’t want to appear in the same light as a lot of personal licence plate owners.
It’s easy to look for so long for what you think you want, you can’t find it and then settle for something else, something not as relevant as it should be. It’s not the one that was wanted, but it will do. And the thought probably is ‘it must be bought now, before someone else beats me to it. I don’t know if the right one will ever come along so let’s make this one do’. That sort of thing.
Because there’s also the chance that if you look for long enough you can lose track, lose the original intended purpose.
Maybe then the need to look for that personal licence plate right now wasn’t anything to do with finding the desired licence plate. Maybe it was to come to the conclusion that there wasn’t a desired licence plate to fit to my own individuality.
There could even have been a third sense telling me to avoid buying a licence plate for the sake of it, it was better not to have a personal licence plate at all than one which wasn’t right.
That would make sense to me. Sort of once and for all kind of thing.

I take a step backwards and within my mind’s eye look at all my previous licence plates on all my previous vehicles. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the various names and reasons attributed to all of those plates and cars. After all, it was myself who had come up with the presumption that decades worth of vehicles with their own fitted plates always meant something.
There was a very real reason for that. Only I could see things that way. Only I was able to imagine this set of circumstances. Only my licence plates on my cars would ever go to create this unfolding story.
It was in the stars, surely.
In the stars too, a reason to believe that I needed a personal licence plate now. Or, was it a need to believe I did not need one now. Was that what was in the stars?
How else can this licence plate thing continue? Especially as now, on my latest car, I couldn’t make the licence plate work anymore. My latest licence plate was nice. I really liked it. It didn’t though fit the rest of the numerous plates in my car history, in as much as I couldn’t see anything in it. I couldn’t read anything in it. 
I had come so far with so many licence plates and it can’t just stop here, surely?

I knew the licence plate on my newest car before I bought the car. In fact, during my on-line search I had constructed a top ten list of cars that I was interested in, which later, and due to the mileage involved to get to some of them, I then had to lower to a top five. I knew all the plates on all of them.
Strangest of all was that before my search for a replacement car to BV54 KTJ began, I didn’t even know what type of car I should buy.
That was a first. I’d always known in the past which type of car I wanted to buy, and if I hadn’t then the right one had jumped out at me.
On this occasion that swing wasn’t happening. I wanted British. That for me was a good start. My previous cars hadn’t always been British, it’s true, but most had been. Those that weren’t had been second hand, so it didn’t seem to matter as much.
All my new vehicles had been British, through and through. Something I was very proud of.

Coming back to number plates, the enormity of the task seemed to narrow. It looked that way because I felt the time was right. It was time to get this licence plate thing wrapped up. The window of opportunity was getting bigger and bigger in terms of ease of search. It occurred to me that I may be closing in on what I was looking for. For some unexplained reason in my mind I was aware of this.
Then I tried a combination that hadn’t occurred to me before. I was looking and seeing licence plates in a different dimension – sort of. I could see other words or numbers fit and look sensible where I hadn’t considered them before. Or even letters for that matter; letters that meant something to me, but wouldn’t to anyone else.

But hang on a minute.
My inner mind baulks, briefly. I stop myself. I don’t want to end up with meaningless letters.
Whilst looking at licence plates the hunt was definitely becoming less and less of a burden to locate that one plate, the one which meant everything to me. It is how it felt.
Be careful, I say to myself. Don’t be drawn into buying for the sake of it. 
I just knew. I knew this was now the right time.

When I saw a work colleague drive into the car park with a personal number plate on his car my immediate thought was: ‘What does that number stand for. To the passer-by it was meaningless.
I knew his initials and I could plainly read them as the last three letters on the plate. That was the obvious bit. What wasn’t so obvious was the initial letter followed by two numbers. Looking at the plate, that part didn’t read as anything at all. Why that number and why that letter?
And this was the bit I wanted to avoid. That plate, along with thousands of others like it, meant nothing to anyone except the person who ran it. Probably the first letter and the preceding two numbers on the work colleague’s plate also meant nothing to him either. I didn’t see how they could. They literally didn’t have a meaning no matter how they were observed, concocted, altered or anything else.

Putting a licence plate of my own on my vehicle does drastically change the whole concept of Alphabetical Licence in one way. It kind of nulls the original vision and the trend stops.
On the other hand, it starts again.
I think about this:
My latest car is great. Considering I hadn’t even considered that type before, it was a bit of a misnomer in some ways.
The licence plate meant nothing. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. That said, it was quite a nice licence plate and I would happily have driven around without changing it.
And here’s the third dimension: I’m happily moving along in my relationship; which was a complete U turn from any previous relationship. And I end up buying a car model which was a complete U turn from any previous car purchase. Unbelievable!

Personal licenced number.
As for the licence plate:
I, unbelievably quickly, manage to find the one licence plate dedicated to me. It was out there all the time (probably.) Well, at least it would have been out there since around 1998, the end of the old registration plate appearance. I just needed to play around with the combination a bit.
To me, it’s two number plates in one. It’s not even 99 %, it’s a 100%.
That’s as good as it gets.

I see personal plates all over the place, some fitted to very expensive cars. Interpreting those plates most of the time can only really be guessed as the owners initials. Names or initials sitting alongside impossible numbers. I’m willing to bet that a lot of the numbers don’t actually have a defined meaning to them. They just happened to be on a licence plate for sale whereby after the number (s) was then added either the set of initials, or a three letter name: half the time not even a real name – (more like a nick-name.)
That would make these type of plate combinations somewhere around 50% correct and 50% made up – at best. That makes them 50% as good as they can get – at best.

The chosen one –
Was it worth waiting for 40 years to find that one off licence plate just for myself?
You bet it was!
Very early on I decided I wouldn’t be using my first name on any licence plate. I couldn’t. It was four letters when used as one syllable.
So I used my last name; which is also four letters.
I was quite proud of my imagination in that I managed to interpose that name onto a licence plate so that it read as my name.
You see, during our schoolboy racing years, we four brothers were issued with a race number; which was ours to use and keep for however long schoolboy racing lasts. 
Later, in adult racing, that number has a real possibility of remaining. It only requires a little chat to the organisers of events. I mean, why not? Every one racing has to have race number.
My brother still races with his old schoolboy race number. I would too if I resumed where I left off.
My eldest brothers race number is 98. There’s another three brothers to have numbers run consecutively to 98.
Looking at consecutive numbers, the lower of four from 98 would be 95. Being in the equal middle I could have had 96 or 97. But I didn’t because my younger brother doesn’t get allocated number 95.
He gets his race number allocated to him and it’s number 101.
I remember cheering those race event organisers from so long ago in coming up with such a brilliant number allocation for four brothers. It couldn’t have been better if they tried.
My twin brother, who is equal middle, gets his race number allocated to him, and it’s number 100.
My race number was 99. The allocation of race numbers never did go from 98 to a lower number for the younger brother. They went the other way around.

W99 means something:
I now have the first letter of my last name in front of 99, followed by the last three letters of my last name after gap between letters and numbers.
For me it’s as good as it gets. It’s two number plates in one.